THE USSR, AND MY Y-FRONTS' PART IN ITS DOWNFALL

The girls were watching members of AKB48 personally test the springability of various celebrity transvestites' plastic surgery bits on prime time TV over at the mother-in-law's tonight, and Our Man realised he has been feeling a bit more out of it than usual.

Granted, this is not unusual for Our Man, he does on the whole enjoy his splendid isolation, but every now and then it's good to catch up with the rest of the world. But after attempting to see it from Mitt Romney's perspective, Our Man was accused on Twitter of being a gaijin with untrustworthy insights into Japan. Which was quite insulting, until he came round to the view that, yes, he is a gaijin and yes, his views on Japan are untrustworthy. Though what that all had to do with Mitt the Younger, he couldn't follow. Well, that's the limits of 140 characters for you. 

Anyway, here's a link that you probably all know about, but just in case you all are as out of it as Our Man is, here it is anyway: 

www.gutenberg.org
They have 40,000 out-of-copyright books that you can download to your ereader. Our Man picked up for his Kindle a War and Peace, a couple of Twain essays, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a couple of H.G. Wells novels and some Sherlock Holmes adventures all for free. You can't help but go high-brow when everything is published pre-1923.

Which is all marvelous, but distracts, like this blog post, from the main task at hand, which is to finish writing an essay on Tokyo Disneyland, North Korea and the true story of Our Man's Y-fronts and their part in the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Socialist Soviet Republics, Our Man forgets the right order at this time of the morning. 

One interesting fact that Our Man stumbled upon in the course of researching (researching?? - ed) the essay: Bet you can't guess (unless you can read numbers bolded up in green later on in this post) the bar tab that "the father of Tokyo Disneyland" ran up, just in the first month of land purchase negotiations with a bunch of Urayasu fishermen? It was back in 1961, but in today's money it would be worth...

$80,000

Pretty good considering you can't find a drop of liquor in Tokyo Disney for love or money these days. And negotiations dragged on for nine years.

Anyway, Our Man is going to offer the essay to Granta for first refusal. Hopefully they will refuse it sharpish, then Our Man will publish it asap as an Amazon single. You have been warned.

Carry on.[image error]